What to expect from executive coaching.

Coaching is not consulting, and the difference decides what you get

Consulting answers the question for you. Coaching builds the judgment you use the next time the question arrives. A consultant takes the diagnosis away and returns with a recommendation. A coach sits with you while you look at the same situation and leaves you with a decision you can defend, plus a written next step and a date.

This matters because most leaders who hire help are not short of information. They are short of an uninterrupted hour with someone outside the payroll who will say the uncomfortable thing plainly.

• Consulting output: an answer, delivered by the person you hired.
• Coaching output: your decision, your reasoning, and the two or three moves you make next.

The first session

The first hour is a working session, not a discovery call and not a sales meeting. You have already booked and paid for it, so it starts on the situation you brought.

Expect to be asked what you have already tried, what you have ruled out, and what would have to be true for the opposite choice to make sense. Expect to leave with the situation named in one sentence, the options in front of you, and the next three actions written down with dates.

Expect a direct answer when you ask for one. If you want someone to think out loud with and never be told what they think, say so at the start and the hour runs that way instead. It is your hour.

What leaders usually bring

Three subjects come up more than any others, and none of them appear on a performance review.

• A conversation that keeps sliding: the board member, the co-founder, the senior who is struggling. The work is the script, the pause before the first sentence, and what to do with the answer you are afraid of.
• A decision that moves every week: pricing, headcount, a partnership, a market. The work is separating what is genuinely undecided from what is merely uncomfortable.
• How the job changed them: the promotion that made them lonely, the version of themselves they perform at work. This is the part most people cannot raise with anyone inside the building.

Cadence, length and cost

Most executive engagements run 90 minutes once or twice a month, with email support between sessions for the decision that cannot wait. Some clients work weekly on a specific transition for six weeks, then move to monthly.

Sessions run 30 to 120 minutes and are priced by length rather than by the seniority of the client. Sixty minutes is $150, 90 minutes is $225 and 120 minutes is $300, the same whether you join by video anywhere in the United States or sit in the Florence, South Carolina office.

• Confidential in practice, not only in policy: no diagnosis, no assessment you have not agreed to, and no report to your employer, your board or your team.
• Documented lightly: you leave each session with written actions, not a transcript.
• Bounded: coaching is not therapy and does not treat any condition. When a licensed professional is the right resource, you will be told directly.

How to tell whether it is working

A good engagement shows up in behavior rather than in feelings. Within the first three sessions, one of the situations you arrived with should have moved: the conversation happened, the decision closed, the hire was made, or the answer you were avoiding got written down.

If nothing has moved by the third session and the hour has become a pleasant place to unload, say so. A coach who will not name that out loud is not doing the job.